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| Life updateHello all. 好久不见! Long time no see.
Xanga is still blocked here in China (in fact a lot of things are due to an upcoming 20th anniversary of a fairly sensitive event involving a square in Beijing) but I managed to get on here through a proxy so here is a quick update on my life.
Erik and I have been working at a kindergarten teaching English since Feb. 2009. We teach there 10 hours a week and supplement our rather low income by teaching a few private classes and small classes at our house. Life is good, and we enjoy the kindergarten much more than our previous jobs working at Inter.
Our dingo Baozi is about a year and a half old, and he loves our new, 3 bedroom apartment on the 22nd floor. We love it too. We have a balcony, 2 bathrooms (one Western and one Chinese) and more cabinets than we know what to do with. Seriously, we have been living here since January and we still have empty cabinets.
We are trying not to accumulate too much "stuff" because we may be moving sometime in the next year across the country to a place called Urumuqi, in Xinjiang province. We would be working in a resort as managers. The project is still waiting for full funding, so we don't know when that will happen, but it is exciting and scary. We would be working with one of China's minority groups, the Uighers.
Ok, must go get ready for a student who will be here any moment, will try to update again soon! | | |
| Life updateHello all. 好久不见! Long time no see.
Xanga is still blocked here in China (in fact a lot of things are due to an upcoming 20th anniversary of a fairly sensitive event involving a square in Beijing) but I managed to get on here through a proxy so here is a quick update on my life.
Erik and I have been working at a kindergarten teaching English since Feb. 2009. We teach there 10 hours a week and supplement our rather low income by teaching a few private classes and small classes at our house. Life is good, and we enjoy the kindergarten much more than our previous jobs working at Inter.
Our dingo Baozi is about a year and a half old, and he loves our new, 3 bedroom apartment on the 22nd floor. We love it too. We have a balcony, 2 bathrooms (one Western and one Chinese) and more cabinets than we know what to do with. Seriously, we have been living here since January and we still have empty cabinets.
We are trying not to accumulate too much "stuff" because we may be moving sometime in the next year across the country to a place called Urumuqi, in Xinjiang province. We would be working in a resort as managers. The project is still waiting for full funding, so we don't know when that will happen, but it is exciting and scary. We would be working with one of China's minority groups, the Uighers.
Ok, must go get ready for a student who will be here any moment, will try to update again soon! | | |
| Arrived!  We made it to Ohio late last night after 36 hours of travel. Today I went with the girls for a mani/pedi and everybody is running everywhere doing last minute wedding things. The flowers have not arrived yet, and they were ordered from the internet, so much freaking out. Hopefully they will arrive soon or we just may have to send out raiding parties to all the local florists! Batchelorette party tonight! We shall see how awake I will be by then. | | |
|  Well, we fly to the US tomorrow for Erik's sister Brecka's wedding. Theoretically we fly to the US tomorrow. See, we purchased tickets to Shanghai on China Southern, and then from Shanghai we are supposed to have buddy passes on some Delta flights to get to Atlanta and finally Ohio. Flying on buddy passes means that we might not fly, if all the seats are sold we will have to wait for another flight with some empty seats, and that's always made me a little nervous, especially because if we miss too many flights we could miss the wedding entirely. Then this afternoon the phone rang and someone was telling us something in Chinese about our flight to Shanghai, the one with the purchased tickets, the only one I was thinking would for sure happen...turns out it is cancelled. So they wanted us to agree to take a flight later in the afternoon, but then we would miss the connection to Atlanta for sure. So we convinced them to put us on an earlier flight, with a different airline. They are delivering the new tickets to us at school tonight. (That's right, we still use paper tickets over here, and we had to pay in cash, the delivery guy doesn't accept credit.) Wheee! Cross your fingers and keep us in your thoughts! Here's hoping we make it, Brecka! | | |
| A little bit greenEnvironmentalism is usually something that I'm aware is a good thing, but to be honest, it doesn't really come into play in my daily life so much. Since I've lived in China for the last three years, I've had to do without things like owning a car or using a dryer for my laundry. Yeah, I walk, ride my bike, or take a bus 95% of the time, but it's necessity. Yeah, I line dry my clothes, but if dryers were for sale in China...well I would get one if I could afford it. Two things happened this week though, to bring the whole envirnmentalism idea up front and center for me.
The first was meeting a girl who we had been "text-message friends" with for several months now. She got our number from the vet where we took Baozi to get all his shots, to be neutered, and where he boards when we are out of town. So originally this girl texted us and said she worked at the vet place, but later we found out it was her friend who worked at the vet place and she pretty much was texting us to improve her English. Meeting people who want to use us as English practice partners is so common that usually we don't pursue the relationship, but for some reason we have kept this one up, and it's been good for us too, since usually she can't figure out how to text us in English. It's good Chinese reading practice for us. So anyway we had our first face to face meeting last night, and she decided to bring us random gifts. Most of it was "Hainan local products" which means it is produced from coconuts. We got coconut flavored wafers (a sort of thin cookie) coconut flavored candy, coconut powder (which apparently you mix with hot water to make a beverage) and some other coconut snack which was sort of a cross between a cookie and candy. All nice, I guess, if you like coconut flavoring! The thing that really got to me though, was the bag of dried shark fin.
 It's used to make shark's fin soup, and it's an expensive delicacy. The thing is, I'm morally opposed to sharks' fin soup. Here's a little background on why:
"While shark fin has no flavor and very little nutritional value, it does provide texture to soup, not to mention handsome profits to an industry estimated to be worth $500 million per year. Fins are dried, de-skinned, boiled and sometimes bleached, and then made into soup by the addition of chicken or fish stock, which provides the flavor. The fins of certain species are considered more valuable because of the length and thickness of the "fin needles" that they contain.
Until the 1980s, the consumption of shark fin soup was discouraged in China. However, the Chinese government relaxed its attitude towards what had been seen as an elitist dish, and consumption soared. Mainland China is now the world's biggest end-market for shark fin: the effect on shark populations has been disastrous.
A bowl of shark fin soup can sell for as much as $100. Because of its perceived value, serving shark fin soup at private functions is a way of honoring one's guests and signaling one's wealth and status. Chinese people frequently express the view that no self-respecting host would ever leave shark fin soup off the menu, particularly at weddings and other important social functions, for fear of losing face.
Every year, millions of sharks suffer painful deaths from the cruel and wasteful shark fin trade. Whether unintended "bycatch" by or caught specifically for their valuable fins, these animals have their fins removed and then—either dead or dying—are immediately cast back into the water. Shark meat is of low commercial value, so fishers save freezer space for highly valued fish and discard the sharks after the animals are "finned."
So anyway, now I don't know what to do. I can't eat the stuff, and I can't regift it either. Since I got it from someone I don't know well and have communication issues with, I couldn't have refused the gift either. She wouldn't have understood why, and it would have been extremely rude of me to do so. Maybe we will donate it to a local homeless shelter, with an explanation of how and why we acquired it.
The other thing that happened yesterday was that China's new ban on ultra-thin shopping bags went into effect. Now factories have stopped producing the ultra thin bags, and shops must use the thicker kind, and charge for them. At our local RT Mart (Da Run Fa) they were charging .3 RMB for large bags and .2 RMB for small ones. That may not seem like much to you, but it actually does make a difference for us here in China, where salaries and cost of living are much lower. There was a massive run on "green" re-usable shopping bags, and Erik and I even decided that after today, we will be bringing our own re-usable bags. This isn't a decision we would have made on our own, but I know it is a good one. I'm sick of seeing plastic bags floating by on the breeze and tangled at the roots of bushes and trees. I'm happy that China has taken this step and even though it's an inconvenience to us and many others, I definitely support it. I hope that it will continue to be enforced.
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